The Sistine Secrets (3 page)

Much later, the slope became the
circus,
or stadium, of the mad emperor Nero. It was here, according to Church tradition, that Saint Peter was executed, crucified upside down, and then buried nearby. This became the destination of so many pilgrims that the emperor Constantine, upon becoming half-Christian, founded a shrine on the spot, which the Romans continued to call the Vatican Slope. A century after Constantine, the popes started building the papal palace there.

What does “the Vatican” mean today? Because of its history, the name has a number of different connotations. It can refer to the Basilica of St. Peter; to the Apostolic Palace of the popes with more than fourteen hundred rooms; to the Vatican Museums complex with more than two thousand rooms; to the political/social/religious hierarchy that is considered the spiritual leadership of about one-fifth of the human race; or to the world’s smallest official country of
Città del Vaticano
(Vatican City). It is indeed strange to consider that this tiniest country on earth, which could fit eight times over inside Central Park in New York City, contains within it the world’s largest and costliest church, the world’s largest and most luxurious palace, and one of the world’s largest museums.

REPLACING THE TEMPLE

Most fascinating of all, though, may well be a place within the ancient fortress walls of Vatican City whose symbolic meaning is unknown to almost all its visitors. Its theological significance can best be realized by noting that this Catholic effort was something explicitly forbidden to Jews. In the Talmud, the ancient holy commentaries of the greatest Jewish sages spanning more than five centuries, it is clearly legislated that no one may construct a functioning full-sized copy of the Holy Temple of Jerusalem in any location other than the Temple Mount itself (Tractate Megillah, 10a). This was decreed in order to avoid any possible bloody religious schisms, such as later happened in Christianity (Roman Catholicism; Eastern and Greek Orthodoxy; Protestantism—and their centuries of internecine warfare) and Islam (Sunni and Shi’ite, who are sadly still killing each other around the globe).

Six centuries ago, however, a Catholic architect who was not constrained by Talmudic laws did exactly that. He designed and built an incredible, full-sized copy of the inner sanctum, or the Holy of Holies, of King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem—right in the middle of Renaissance Rome. To get the measurements and proportions exactly correct, the architect studied the writings of the prophet Samuel in the Hebrew Bible, where Samuel describes the First Holy Temple, cubit by cubit (1 Kings 6:2). This massive reproduction of the
heichal,
or rear section of the First Temple, still exists today. It is called la Cappella Sistina—the Sistine Chapel. And this is where more than four million visitors a year come to view the incredible frescoes of Michelangelo and pay homage to a site sacred to Christianity.

Before the creation of this replica of the Jewish Temple, there had been a chapel on the same spot during the Middle Ages. It was called la Cappella Palatina, or the Palatial Chapel. Since every European ruler had his or her own regal chapel for praying privately with the royal court, it was deemed necessary for the pope also to have one in his own palace. This was to show the power of the Church, which had to be viewed as greater than that of any secular sovereign. It is no coincidence that the word
palatina
comes from the Palatine Hill, the home of the most powerful human beings known to Western history at that point—the pagan emperors of ancient Rome. According to Roman tradition, the Palatine Hill was where Romulus had founded the city on April 21, 753 BCE. Since that time, every ruler of Rome had lived on the Palatine, constructing one spectacular palace after another. The Church was determined to prove that it was the new ruling power in Europe and hoped to spread Christendom, that is, the empire of Christianity, across the globe. This chapel was meant to be a harbinger of this coming triumph and glory, and so the pope wanted its opulence to overshadow that of any other royal chapel on earth.

Aside from the magnificent Palatina, there was also the Niccolina, a private chapel ordained by Pope Nicholas V in 1450 and decorated by the great Renaissance painter Fra Angelico. This was a tiny room in one of the older parts of the papal palace, capable of hosting the pope and a few personal aides. This is why the Palatina also had the nickname of Cappella Maggiore, the Larger Chapel, since it could hold all the papal court and its VIP guests.

The story of the Sistine Chapel, however, begins with a pontiff who wanted the chapel to be even larger and more palatial than la Cappella Palatina.

THE GRAND PLAN OF POPE SIXTUS

Sixtus was born Francesco della Rovere into a humble family in northwestern Italy not far from Genoa. He was a young man with an intellectual bent but no money, so it was only natural that he ended up in the priesthood. He became a Franciscan monk and slowly worked his way up the rungs of the educational and administrative ladder of the Church, finally becoming a cardinal in Rome in 1467. He was elected without much ado by a conclave of only eighteen cardinals and took the name Sixtus IV, the first pope with that name in more than a thousand years. His first acts had nothing to do with the various crises facing the Vatican, but with supplying his family with titles, estates, and privileges. He made his various and sundry nephews obscenely rich by either ordaining them as cardinals (one at only sixteen years of age) or by marrying them off into wealthy, noble families. This was nothing unusual, though. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and right up to the end of the eighteenth century, it was common practice for a corrupt pope to pick his most decadent nephews to do the dirty work necessary to upgrade their entire family’s material status from “well-off” to “astronomically wealthy.” The word for “nephew” in Medieval Italian is
nepote,
and this system of absolute power and absolute corruption became known as
nepotismo
—and in modern English today as
nepotism.
One of Sixtus’s nephews was Giuliano, who later became Pope Julius II—the man who forced Michelangelo to paint the Sistine ceiling.

When Pope Sixtus IV began his reign in 1471, the Palatine Chapel was falling apart. It was a heavy building resting perilously on the soft soil of the former Etruscan graveyard slope of the Vatican. This was a perfect symbol for the crisis of the Church itself when Sixtus took over. It was rife with plots, scandals, and schisms. Foreign rulers, such as Louis XI of France, were warring with the Vatican over the right to select and assign cardinals and bishops. Whole sections of Italy rejected papal jurisdiction. Worst of all, the Ottoman Turks were on the march. Only eighteen years earlier, Constantinople had fallen to the Muslims, marking the death of the Christian Byzantine Empire. Shock waves reverberated throughout Christian Europe. In 1480 the Ottomans invaded the Italian peninsula itself, seizing the city of Otranto on the southeastern coast, slaughtering the archbishop and many priests in the cathedral, forcibly converting the townspeople, beheading eight hundred who refused to convert, and sawing the bishop in half. After that, they attacked several other coastal cities. Many feared that Rome itself would meet the same doom as Constantinople.

In spite of all these existential threats to Christendom, Sixtus spent vast amounts of the Vatican’s gold on reviving the splendors of Rome, rebuilding churches, bridges, streets, founding the Vatican Library, and starting an art collection that would become the Capitoline Museum, the oldest operating museum in the world today. His most famous project, however, was the rebuilding of the Palatine Chapel.

There is so much about the history of the Sistine that seems predestined. According to the more reliable sources, work began on renovating the chapel in 1475. In the very same year, in the Tuscan town of Caprese, Michelangelo Buonarroti was born. Their fates would weave ever more tightly together in the years to come.

THE NEW CHAPEL

Pope Sixtus decided not just to rebuild the decaying papal chapel but to enlarge and enrich it. He brought in a young Florentine architect named Bartolomeo (“Baccio”) Pontelli. Pontelli’s specialty was the construction and reinforcement of fortresses, such as the ones still standing in fine condition in Ostia and Senigallia. This was especially important to Sixtus, since he feared both the Turkish Muslims and the Catholic mobs of Rome. The designs were drawn up for a huge chapel, larger than most churches, with a fortress lookout bastion on top to defend the Vatican.

We may never know for certain whose idea it was to build the Sistine Chapel as a copy of the Jewish Holy Temple. Sixtus was learned in scripture, so he would have been aware of the exact measurements found in the writings of Samuel the Prophet in 2 Kings. With this in mind, he might have been anxious to give concrete expression to the theological concept of
successionism,
an idea that had already found an important place in Christian thought. Successionism means that one faith can replace a previous one that has ceased to function. In religious terms, it is comparable to what Darwin would later postulate in the theory of evolution: the dinosaurs were replaced by the Neanderthals who were in turn replaced by fully developed
Homo sapiens.
As taught by successionism, the belief is that the Greco-Roman pagan philosophies were replaced by Judaism, which in turn was superseded by the Church Triumphant, the True Faith that rendered all others invalid. The Vatican preached that because the Jews had killed Jesus and rejected his teachings they were punished with the loss of their Holy Temple and the city of Jerusalem, as well as their homeland. In addition, they were damned to wander the earth forever as a divine warning to anyone who might refuse to obey the Church. (It is important to note that this teaching was categorically rejected and forbidden by the Second Vatican Council in 1962.)

Baccio Pontelli, on the other hand, was not a great religious scholar. However, he was a Florentine. Florence was one of the most liberal, open-minded cities in Italy—and indeed, in Europe—at that time. The Jewish community of Florence, though numbering only several hundred, was well accepted and influential in the city’s bustling intellectual and cultural activity. Pontelli would have known many artists and architects who were accustomed to incorporating Jewish themes in their work.

Whoever’s idea it was, the new Palatine Chapel was designed to replace the ancient Jewish Temple as the New Holy Temple of the New World Order in the New Jerusalem, which would from this time forward be the city of Rome, the capital of Christendom. Its measurements are 134.28 feet long by 43.99 feet wide by 67.91 feet high—exactly those of the
heichal,
the long, rectangular back section of the First Holy Temple completed by King Solomon and his architect King Hiram of Tyre (Lebanon) in 930 BCE.

More remarkable still, and a fact that most visitors do not realize, is that in keeping with the intent to simulate the sacred site that existed in ancient Jerusalem, the sanctuary was built on two levels. The western half, containing the altar and the private area for the pope and his court, is about six inches higher than the eastern half, originally meant for the common onlookers. This elevated section corresponds to the farthest recess of the original Holy Temple—the
Kodesh Kodoshim,
the Holy of Holies—where only the High Priest could enter and then only once a year, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The High Priest would symbolically pass through the
parochet
curtain, referred to in the Gospels as the veil, to perform the all-important prayer of forgiveness and redemption for the people. To show exactly where this veil would have been in the Temple of Jerusalem, a huge white marble partition grill was commissioned, with seven marble “flames” on top, to correspond to the Holy Menorah (seven-branched candelabrum) that glorified the Jewish sanctuary in biblical times.

FROM CEILING TO FLOOR

The original ceiling illustrated a simple theme shared by many synagogues: a night sky, filled with golden stars. This scene is reminiscent of Jacob’s dream while sleeping under the stars (Genesis 28:11–19) shortly after fleeing his father’s house. It was then that Jacob had a vision of “a ladder with angels ascending and descending,” and it was that spot that he named
Beit-El,
the House of God. In Jewish tradition this would be the very location on which the Temple was built. By making symbolic reference to this story, the ceiling expressed yet another connection with the Holy Temple of Jerusalem.

To add to the chapel’s uniqueness, great attention was also given to its floor. It is a stunning masterpiece that usually goes unnoticed by the average visitor, since it is obscured by the feet of thousands of people, and overlooked because of the world-famous frescoes above. The floor is a fifteenth-century revival of medieval Cosmatesque mosaic style. The Cosmati family developed their unmistakable technique in Rome in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This decorating style was a fantasy of geometric shapes and swirls in cut pieces of colored glass and marble (much of which was “recycled” from pagan Roman palaces and temples). Stunning examples of authentic Cosmati floors and decorations can be found in some of the oldest and most beautiful churches, basilicas, and cloisters in Rome and southern Italy. One of the last Cosmati artisans was brought to London in the thirteenth century to do the mystical floor mosaics in Westminster Abbey.

It is generally acknowledged that these very special floors were esteemed not only for their beauty and the richness of the colors and materials (including the priceless purple porphyry marble), but also for their esoteric spirituality. Much has been written about these mosaics by theologians, architects, and even mathematicians. In part, they give any sanctuary a feeling of space, rhythm, and flowing movement. Undoubtedly, they are also a meditational device, similar to the mazes and labyrinths popular in churches in the Middle Ages. In the Sistine, the flooring is a variant on these Cosmati floors, having been designed two centuries after the famed family finished its last project. The design was based on a few sections that had survived from the earlier chapel, but then took on a style and a meaning of its own.